Was it the greatest tournament ever? Possibly not. Was it the greatest tournament in my lifetime? Quite possibly yes. Whether it was the atmosphere, the results or just the fact that my tournament viewing was for once unimpeded by nationalistic sentiment and despair, Euro 2008 will live on in my memory at least for a very long time.
The tendency in most international tournaments is for flair to give way to more negative tactics as the schedule drags on and teams become more preoccupied with making sure the game is not lost ahead of playing as hard as they can to win, but by and large this never really materialised here, as free flowing football persisted even until the final.
And as for memories to take away, it is difficult to know where to start. The scenes of the injury-ravaged Turkey side securing a series of unlikely comebacks provided the drama of the underdog triumphing against all odds, figures like Croatia's Slaven Bilic and Portugal's Luis Scolari provided the love-them-or-hate-them coaches, and it proved almost impossible to hate Bilic's rampant touchline gestures and celebration. Meanwhile, we saw members of European football's old guard vanquished, as a dreadful France succumbed at the group stages, Italy's negative tactics were given the punishment they deserved with a penalty kick elimination at the hands of Spain, and even the Greek heroes from four years ago were found out when asked to try and compete with the sexy football of Spain and Russia with their own prehistoric tactics.
We had the poetry of Spain burying old demons, triumphing in the shoot out against the Italians where they had failed in so many tournaments past, and finally ending decades of underachievement by lifting the trophy in Vienna. We had the joy of watching the Dutch, expected by most to fall foul of the "group of death" in their self-destructive way, play Italy and France off the pitch, racking up seven goals of the highest quality in the process. We had a new, stylish Russia side headed by Guus Hiddink wowing the tournament with devastating displays of passing football, and the accompanying fairytale of Hiddink's side vanquishing the similarly-talented Dutch (Hiddink's own home country) in the quarter finals.
There was the soap opera of Portugal, seemingly tipped for greatness in these finals, but never seeming to recover from Scolari's announcement that he was to leave for Stamford Bridge at the end of the tournament, the pluck of a German side so deficient in so many areas, and yet so able, in that German manner, of producing unlikely results to make their 13th major final.
And the goals, from the teamwork and craft of the Netherlands and Russia, with sublime moves ripping through the opposition defence, to the moments of individual brilliance from the likes of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Nihat Kahveci and Michael Ballack. And the great performances, from the likes of Wesley Sneijder, Andrei Arshavin, David Villa and Bastian Schweinsteiger, who saw their lights shine brighter than the rest, before succumbing to superior opposition or injury.
Quite simply, it was three weeks of sporting theatre, as good as any sport has provided in living memory. And yet partway through the tournament, well before we imagined seeing Iker Casillas lift the trophy aloft in the Ernst Happel Stadium, UEFA's member nations were conspiring to ruin everything. The 53 nations that make up UEFA voted unanimously in favour of plans to up the number of spots in the final for the 2016 event, from the current 16 all the way up to 20, or more likely as high as 24.
Notwithstanding the reasons behind this, which are undoubtedly fiscal in nature, is this in any way a good thing? Is there a benefit in having almost half of the 53 teams that enter in qualifying making it through to the finals? Take the final qualifying standings for Euro 2008 as a guide to a who's who of the "nearly but not quites" who would benefit from this. Would the tournament have been improved with the addition of Norway? Or Bulgaria? Or, dare I say it, England? Quite probably not, in fact certainly not.
That isn't an affront to any of those nations. If qualifying had played out differently and one or more of those had replaced Romania, Sweden, the Czech Republic or whoever, there wouldn't have been any problem. My issue is not with the sort of teams that may then get to the finals, but with the added burden of fixtures and time that the expanded schedule would make necessary.
There is an analogy to be drawn between football and cricket here. If the Football World Cup is akin to the Cricket World Cup, a tournament now so desperately bloated in pursuit of extra revenue that the drama has almost completely gone from it (as The Elbow opined to me during yesterday's final, for all he knows, the 2007 event is still actually going on somewhere in the Caribbean), then the current European Championship setup is akin to the World 20/20 finals, a tightly run, compact schedule, where the potential to allow more, weaker, nations to compete in order to prolong events has thankfully been ignored, at least for now.
The analogy there doesn't quite hold up to scrutiny. In cricket, the gap between the test playing sides and the rest is a yawning gulf of class, and allowing extra sides into the tournament can make sense from a development point of view, witness the growth of Bangladesh to test status, of Kenya to international one day status, or the growing status of Ireland following their unlikely run in the much-derided 2007 event, but in football, with it's lengthy and well covered qualifying tournament in the years before the finals, this is less of an issue. Expanding to 24 teams or beyond isn't going to allow some impoverished, football-light nation to get to the finals, but simply more average sides too lazy, unlucky or incapable to scrape through in the qualifying stages.
Then there is the impact on the tournament finals. Should the format switch to 6 groups of 4, where the top two (and four best 3rd place sides) make it through to the last 16, the group stages will become almost an irrelevance, as top nations will now know that a single win in their three games would be enough to see them progress. Even at as open a tournament as Euro 2008, we still had sides qualifying with a game to spare and risking credibility by fielding reserve sides in their final, largely meaningless, games, but in a system where potentially only one of every four would be eliminated, this practice would increase. Even in the qualifying stages, where there are often three sides fighting it out for two qualifying spots, the number of dead rubber games would be increased once it became apparent that all three of them would make it through.
If extra space is deemed necessary for some nations, perhaps a good starting point would be to scrap the joint-hosting duties. No disrespect to either Switzerland or Austria, who hosted brilliant events and matches, and whose sides battled as hard as any in their efforts to make the quarter finals, but without the bye offered to host nations they would have struggled to make the finals, and with their places disappear two of the 16 spaces for other countries to grab. The situation could get bizarrely worse in the future. One of the bids for the 2020 event is mooted to be a three-way bid between Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, a situation that would lead to the laughable prospect of the European Championships technically taking place in Asia.
What UEFA have is something that the World Cup lost a long time ago, a three week, well-balanced spread of matches, between a decent gamut of competing countries, all neatly wrapped up in a time frame which always hold the fans attention. If UEFA President Michel Platini ends up bowing to the greedy lust of an extended tournament, with more money-spinning matches and an extra week of time for travelling fans to spend their time buying overpriced merchandise, then it will be to the overall detriment to the spectacle.
Euro 2008 was brilliant, Mr Platini. Nothing is broke, hence nothing needs fixing.
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